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“What is your Biggest Weakness?” The Classic Interview Question.

This is the point where we all lie and list a strength and tell the interviewer that our biggest weakness is that we just work too darn hard or some other such tripe. To be honest, I don’t know why they ask this question and what they really expect for an answer.

However, I will freely admit one of mine here. I love to code. When given a project such as a difficult report, I will often start writing code. This is especially true if I anticipate the code will be difficult or tricky.

How is a love of coding a weakness? Well, it’s because when I do this I often end up coding the same project several times. Why does this happen? One of the reasons it happens is that I often put the logic into my SQL script when that should be done in the presentation layer.

Always begin a report project with the delivery medium in mind.

When a user asks me for year to date incoming sales for customers in Dallas, TX my brain spits out the following:

However, this is not what I need. If you review the above code, you will notice that I only pulled totals per customer number. What if the user wants to be able to drill down into particular customers and see which products they are purchasing? I need to list all the sales for these companies and then group in the presentation layer, in this case Crystal Reports. Therefore the user will be able to drill down into the data, while at the same time seeing their subtotals. Re-writing this short script is trivial, but many of them are not.

Just for reference the script I would use for this would be something like:

When working for my previous employer I did a lot of ad hoc reporting all the time. Your Excel Hell post doesn’t even begin to come close, I assure you. But it was a Fortune 500 company full of some of the most computer savvy people company-wide that I’ve ever worked with. So when someone there told me they wanted a report that showed A, B, and C, then that’s exactly what they wanted and they wanted.

The company I work for now though is a very small town, old school sort of company where the majority of our users aren’t entirely sure what the full functionality of copy and paste are. I’m not trying to insult my coworkers here, it’s just the truth of the situation; the majority of the people here just aren’t used to using computers for anything beyond email. So when they ask for a report they generally have only a very small idea of what they need and have no idea how to manipulate the data that you give them. Bob the Salesman might prefer his reports formatted one way while Sally in Accounting wants hers completely different.

That creates the problem of me finishing a report and then having them come back three or four times asking for things to be moved, added to, removed from, scrapped and rebuilt, etc. I do exactly what you tell me to, not necessarily exactly what you want me to because I’m so used to that being the need.

So my biggest weakness is probably going to be expressed best by saying that I often process user requests like a computer would (giving you exactly what you asked for) rather than processing it like the user themselves would.

Something I’ve realized recently while working on this Access project…

My first instinct is to code everything myself. Even if there are built in tools I could use, I don’t really trust them and it’s quicker for me to bypass their frustrating limitations (query builder anyone?). So yeah, I can make a great product this way, but when it’s time to pass it off to someone else, they have no idea how to maintain it. All they see is the frontend stuff, and the last place they think to look is in the vba. It’s there and well documented, but it’s not the way Access intends their product to be used.

So, I guess I’d say that my weakness is that I overthink things, spend too much of a scarce resource (i.e., my time) on customizing a product to be “just so”, and I provide uber functionality at the expense of maintainability down the road.

Then again…these are all reasons why a company should hire me, but make it worth my while to stay a long time 🙂

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[…] I was enjoying being an audience to the “greatest weakness” posts going around in the latest meme. This time it was started by David Stein who blogs (quite regularly) over at Made2Mentor.com in his post, “What is your biggest weakness? – The Classic Interview Question”. […]